Forum / Stuart Dybek article...pretty good stuff

• 
  Henry Standing Bear

  Jun 23, 02:49am

  "Stuart Dybek’s masterpiece has 19 user reviews on Amazon. There’s a white plastic colander with 72."

  http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/stuart_dybek_s_short_story_collections_ecstatic_cahoots_and_paper_lantern.html?utm_content=bufferda31b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

• 
  Henry Standing Bear

  Jun 23, 03:10am

  Well, it's a review of his story collection, but it makes article-like points throughout. And I agree with the final weigh in. We do need to move clear of the old Updike "epiphany" ending more today. Let some shit happen in our stories, you know?

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Jun 23, 08:16am

  Thanks for sharing the review, Sheldon. It adds to the feeling that the world of very short story writers is very tiny, three to be exact. One wonders at the willfulness of that false claim. It is wonderful to give a writer deserved credit but why assert he is one of three writers in the form? It is preposterous! I guess that is partly why a few very, very good writers we could name are still running aground in engaging publishers for their completely relevant short pieces. It's the claim that it is a field of one or two or three that is so fierce. Can any of us imagine claiming that there are three novelists in the world?

• 
  Henry Standing Bear

  Jun 23, 12:03pm

  Hi Ann...I came away with the epiphany thing mostly and sort of zoned some of the small world of three thing you've brought up here from the review. That said, it is dangerous and strangely common for critics, etc. to want, for some reason, to whittle a form down to two or three practitioners for some reason. It does even happen from time to time with the novel in certain articles I've read (i.e. Roth, Pynchon, DeLillo). I have no idea what people are thinking half the time anyways. I can say for sure there are people writing good long and short stories and plenty of them. The short shorts are harder and there are fewer writers doing these well, maybe, but it's all pretty interesting to consider, yep.

• 
  David Ackley

  Jun 23, 12:28pm

  Even in lumping them together, I thought the writer seriously mischaracterized the work of the writers mentioned. Anyone who thinks Alice Munro's work is imprisoned in the model of the ending epiphany is so unfamiliar with the range of her work as to be unqualified to comment. I think of "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," "Wild Geese," and "A Wilderness Station," just to name a quick few that fall completely outside, in form, subject and ending, the model that the reviewer has proposed.

• 
  Henry Standing Bear

  Jun 23, 12:35pm

  Cool...I'll confess this moment I've never read a single Munro story, not one. Phil Deaver, a writer I worked with during my MFA days, praised and praised ol' Alice and since, for awhile, me and Phil didn't get along too great, I avoided reading her. He's a guy who won the Flannery O' Conner Award with his first story collection and he didn't care for my first novel attempt during my first year working as a grad student. We've made up at this point and so I been meaning to read her. These stories you mention here will be a fine starting point. What I took from it all in this review was that Updike had an "original" idea when he wrote "A&P" and, like Carver's work, it was so powerful that others couldn't help but follow. It created this odd stagnation for awhile. But anyone reading stories today can see the story has put knees to chest and made it out of that mire pretty well, I think.

• 
  David Ackley

  Jun 23, 02:32pm

  I also think that the influence of the form he describes goes back further than Updike's "A & P" which looked at comparatively is ( change the setting and age of the character) a dead clone of James Joyce's "Araby," in DUBLINERS.

  DUBLINERS was and is a tremendously powerful influence, where the concept of the epiphany, though described in PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST... was first exemplified in short stories. He's not wrong in thinking though that a lot of stories and writers have followed it slavishly. At the same time there are many writers who've escaped it, even dating from Joyce's own time or shortly thereafter: Hemingway and Faulkner for example.
  Then later Barthelme, Barth, Hawkes, Coover whose recent stellar contrary examples have appeared in the New Yorker. "Going for a Beer," published last year or the year before is a nice case in point.

  It's too easy to make an argument by simply ignoring all the exceptions.

• 
  Henry Standing Bear

  Jun 23, 02:46pm

  "It's too easy to make an argument by simply ignoring all the exceptions." Right on. I like that a lot. Man, I forgot about how amazing "Going for a Beer" was. I came across that story a couple years back or something like that and was knocked out. Heading back to read it again now. And you're of course right about "Araby". I believe what the reviewer is laboring at a little is about the idea you all are expressing - there are people writing really good stories today and, at least for awhile and among some lit elite, stories suffered from lazy eye and leg.

• 
  Henry Standing Bear

  Jun 23, 02:50pm

  By the way, folks, if you haven't read "Going for a Beer" stop and do it now:

  http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/03/14/110314fi_fiction_coover

• 
  Matthew Robinson

  Jun 25, 07:21am

  "Going for a Beer" is so goddamn good. Like, I printed it off the web when it was made available and read it at least once a month, that kind of good.

  As far as Dybek goes, I own the issue of Tin House in which his highly-regarded story "Tosca" was first published. For whatever reason, it didn't do much for me the first go-around, but after this reviewer and another one (no link, sorry) praised it so highly, I went back and read it again (re-readability is a big thing for me) and, yeah, it's pretty good. It's no "Going for a Beer," though.

• 
  Henry Standing Bear

  Jun 25, 09:19am

  Absolutely...it is no "Going for a Beer"...I only know of a couple stories I'd put in that category...and one of them is another Coover - "The Babysitter"...I think that's Coover. Pretty sure.

• You must log in to reply to this thread.